The Israel Bond Omnibus (11 page)

He inhaled a Raleigh, and pressed it to her lips. “I’m so glad, so glad!” His own eyes were wet now ... rain, he told her, but she smiled in her wise woman’s heart. She knew better. They were indoors.

Nestling in the crook of his bronzed arm, she told him of life in Kansas City, a Mark Twainish tomboy life with marbles, weenie roasts, apple pies cooling on window sills, girls in blue sashes, brown paper packages tied up with strings. “Yes, darling, these were a few of my favorite things.”

Then a secretarial course at the Middle Missouri Valley Land Grant College of Mining, Farming and Baton Twirling, a stint with the Peace Corps in Argentina where she and other shining-eyed young idealists had gone to answer a crying need and build a Howard Johnson’s in the middle of the jungle. While there, she recounted, she had met Loxfinger, already fabulously wealthy due to shrewd speculations, and had accepted a post with him. It was she to whom he had dictated the notes that were later to become “The Plowshare Papers.”

“Where does Saxon fit in?” queried Bond.

“He was already on the scene when I joined the doctor. But if he’s a public relations man, I’m Marjorie Main.”

“You’re far more exciting than Marjorie Main, my sweet,” Bond said gallantly. Which is true, he thought. It was something he felt he could honestly say to any girl. “Why are you suspicious of Saxon?”

“I once asked him if he’d ever worked for B.B.D.&O. and he said in that superior way of his, ‘Hell no! Those railroad jobs are just for niggers and dumb Irish Catholics.’ Now, what P.R. guy wouldn’t know about B.B.D.&O.?”

“And Macaroon?”

“He came later. We picked him up in New York when the doctor first went to America to accept the Brandeis award.”

“New York? Saxon said he was a part-Negro, part-Scotch waif Loxfinger found in Marseilles.”

“I don’t know why Saxon’s been telling you these things, darling. The ancestry part is okay, but he was recruited in New York.”

Three black marks for Saxon! The brown woolen suit that no P.R. man in his right mind would ever wear, his ignorance of the advertising field, his blatant lie about Macaroon. I hope Goshen’s checked him out good. But, again, why would Loxfinger employ such a man?

As they dressed for a last big night on the town before the flight to Israel on the morrow (the doctor had accepted an invitation to vacation at a kibbutz in the Negev), Bond kept trying to solve the puzzle. But he had promised Poontang a memorable farewell blast. I’ll think about it later.

He slipped into a fawn-colored pair of tapered Benito Brioschi slacks, a crisp Harry Cotler roc’s-egg-white shirt, a neat regimental four-in-hand from Tie City, a dashing Jack Paar-type boating jacket with gold braids, doffed a visored commander’s cap and boffed Poontang once more for luck. As he put on his cufflinks, the Grecian drama-masks set, each link showing a face of a little Greek boy being abused by another Greek boy, one smiling, one weeping, he looked at Poontang and was forced to chuckle.

She was wearing a very small townish brown and blue gingham checked skirt, middy blouse with a ribbon, red wedgies with ankle straps (definitely passé), and athletic socks. She’s such an adorable hellcat square, he thought. That outfit was fine for a coke ’n aspirin Saturday night date at a Kansas City ice cream parlor, but hardly suitable for a New York evening. He had a glamorous friend on Sutton Place, who would gladly teach Poontang the whys and wherefores of haute couture. That would be Glynda, of course, the Wicked Bitch of the East Side, an acknowledged fashion pace-setter, perennially on the ten-best-dressed list, and one of the town’s most widely respected call girls.

“Poon,” he said. “There’s been quite a stir about a drama called
The Deputy
. I’ve two tickets in the eighth row center. Shall we see it?”

“Oh, Iz,” she said. “Let’s not waste our last night in New York on a stupid Western. Let’s go on the town!”

She wasn’t kidding about her lack of Jewish consciousness, he thought. But, what the hell! She’s a wholesome cornball kid, so let’s have a wholesome cornball evening, make the whole wide-eyed tourist bit. Might be fun at that.

He found something touching about her naiveté, her basic stupidity. Quite a change from the chic, brittle, rootless New York girls he had dated in the past. Stephanie St. John-St. Jill, tall, poised, and filled with wanderlust. She had fallen in with a group of right-wing extremist beatniks (they showed their contempt for the world by showering every hour and dressing well) and had taken Bond to Harlem one night where she stood outside the Apollo Theatre on 125th Street picketing with a brazen sign:

LET’S HAVE MORE POLICE BRUTALITY.

And Judith Lockwood, the stunning yet subdued librarian he had picked up at the main branch on Fifth Avenue, where he had gone to pick up
The Philosophy of Hugh Hefner
. That frustrating evening in his parked Kaiser under the August moon on a Peekskill lover’s lane. “Baby,” he had said fervently, “we’re both mad for it. For God’s sake let’s let ourselves go!” And her answering: “Sh-h-h, please! You’re disturbing people in other cars trying to make love.”

Enough of reminiscences. This evening was Poontang’s.

They launched a Cook’s tour of the bright lights of Manhattan. First, the Ratfink Room atop the Roundtable, where host comedian Jackie Kannon was reading selected works from a classic his firm had published,
Poems for the John
, tickling the jaded roués with his expert nonsense.

Then a movie at a Greenwich Village art house, which proudly advertised that it soon would carry the Natalie Wood Film Festival. Its present offering, however, was a “new wave” flicker,
Hamlet Beach Party
, an attempt to fuse Shakespeare with rock ’n roll to make the Bard more palatable to the teen set. It starred Bobby Vinton as Hamlet, Deborah Walley as Ophelia and Clay Cole as Polonius. It was reasonably faithful to Shakespeare, he admitted, even to the last scene when they all perished by falling off the surfboard.

She fell madly in love with the Village, its quaint shops, cut-rate art galleries (where she got quite a buy on an unpainted Picasso; it had his signature on the canvas; the rest was up to her), and its infinite variety of people. There had been one unpleasant incident when Bond spotted a thin, well-dressed man clucking his tongue in sympathy at the sight of a woman being ravished by a gang of toughs, who had practically stripped her naked.

“It’s terrible,” the man said, puffing his pipe. “Terrible.”

“My God, man! Who is that poor woman?”

“My wife,” said the man. “Look what those hooligans are doing to the poor thing. It’s just terrible!”

“Why are you standing here doing nothing?” an irate Bond snapped. “She’s your wife, man, your wife!”

The man shrugged. “I just don’t feel I should get involved.”

These callous New Yorkers! Bond thought. Well, if he doesn’t want to rescue his own wife, why the hell should I? And he steered Poontang down Bleecker Street.

“Look!” she exclaimed. “A Star of David! It’s a synagogue. Oh, let’s go in, Israel. I feel sorta ... religious tonight.”

“I’d rather not,” Bond said. “It’s strictly for Village Jews. It’s called B’Nai Gay. I was there one Purim and I’d rather forget the whole thing. Such scratching and biting ... they all wanted to be Queen Esther. Finally had to hire a Lesbian to play Haman.”

Then a ride back uptown on the IRT local. Bond noted one particularly clever subway advertisement:

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE JEWISH

TO ENJOY CHUN KING CHOW MEIN.

The usual subway philosophers had covered it with scrawls, some obscene. One, patently a progressive jazz fan from Texas, had written:

LYNDA BIRD LIVES!

They were back in his suite, Bond’s Raleigh smoke drifting up to the power-packed General Electric bulbs he demanded in all his hotel rooms. “Poon, I almost forgot. A little present for you ...” He opened his closet, unwrapped a huge parcel and handed the contents to her.

“Iz! It’s lovely! What a lovely, lovely, super-fab, white fur coat! Oh, darling!” And she kissed him repeatedly. “What is it, ermine?”

“Better than that... genuine Arctic polar bear.” Good old Zvi, an ex-furrier, had turned the skin into a masterpiece.

“Oh, darling ... it must have been so expensive! Cost you an arm and a leg.”

“Well, a hand and a shoulder anyway,” he said, indulging himself in an “inside” joke. “Now take off your clothes and lie on it. Nanook of the North wants to ride again! Mush!”

He took her.

EL AL AIRLINES.

YOU SHOULD ONLY LAND

AND BE WELL.

The sign on the sleek jet warming his heart with its folksiness, Bond, dressed in his Don Loper cape and Bermuda shorts, flashed his M 33 and 1/3 security card to the hostess: “Let’s see the passenger list, please.”

He scanned the names. It was good solid security technique. With Loxfinger aboard, every passenger was a potential threat. He read:

—Len Fischman, New York City, storm window and aluminum siding salesman. (That would definitely be worth checking; they were a ruthless breed.)

—Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Habas, Moonachie, N.J., he the manufacturer of a popular breakfast cereal, Sugar Prizes. No cereal, just candy-coated little toys.

—Rose DeWolf, Ong’s Hat, Ariz., a classless society columnist for the
Daily Worker
. (He put a check by her name.)

—William Blitman, Buzzard’s Bosom, New Mexico, president of Gila Monster City Development Corp., “The Southwest’s Answer to Cape Coral.”

—Rosalie, Dave, and Neal Gomberg, known professionally as the folksinging trio of Peter, Paul, & Mounds.

And so on ...

One name jarred him: “Kismet Ali Herzl, Cairo, Ill., flying carpet merchant.” And in the seat next to his! So they were playing that game again, were they? Cairo, Ill., indeed! Cairo, Egypt, more likely, his trained sixth sense told him. He’d be on his guard.

And, of course, the Loxfinger party, the old man, Saxon, Macaroon, Poontang. He’d told her to play it cool, maintain her usual frigid reserve in his company. But the adorable little hellcat, hopelessly lovesick, had made a salacious grab for him as he passed them; Saxon had seen it, whispered something to Loxfinger.